Mobile Geeks 2019 Tech Trends Predictions

Find out what’s trends to look out for in 2019. Mobile Geeks takes a deeper look past the expected trends at small micro and macro trends to give you heads up on what’s coming next.

The Future of Food

Science has made meatless burger that bleeds, the Stanford based Impossible Foods burger is often sold out. A Chilean food tech start up is using machine learning to create milk and mayo with out milk.

What we eat and where it comes from will be on people’s minds.

Machine Vision

If you’re looking for a macro trend that will shape our lives this is one to watch. This is the technology underpins facial recognition which will allow you to smile to pay or shame jwalkers in China. It’s estimated that by 2022 there will be 44billion embedded cameras in the world. That’s a lot of surveillance but this also means frictionless shopping like Amazon Go will start to become more prevalent.

Tech companies take responsibility

2018 was full of reminders that the fast pace of advancement has social and ethical challenges. Algorithms are making decisions that impact lives and algorithms can be bias. In 2019 consumers will demand that brands and businesses make changes that their AI’s algorithms are fair and unbiased. We’ve started to see tech leaders like Twitter make these changes, and we will see this trend go mainstream this coming year.

This is the year where you nutritionally optimized food

Health and wellness is on the rise. Experimental treatments will be on the rise based on ‘test-and-fix’, turning health into an engineering problem. In Japan, the Nestle Wellness Ambassador program has 100,000 people who have been swabbed and genetically tested. They are sent a personalized nutrient rich supplements designed to maximize health.

The Rise of the City

It is estimated that by 2030 two thirds of the world’s population will live in a city. Innovations around mobility, productivity, sustainability and construction will emerge to solve dense urbanization issues. The private sector will step up to fill the void as national bureaucracy can’t or won’t innovate.

This coming year Millennials and Generation Z will step up in terms of community based initiative that will be the start of what we hope is a positive change.

In Car Voice Systems

As Infotainment systems have made serious strides to modernize we will start to see automotive manufactures will try to make the move towards voice assistants. Amazon entering in the car market means that her skills will be available to developers. Having an mature platform on which a community can build services for consumers faster than manufactures would be able to.

In addition to Alexa we will see automakers roll out their own services will concierge based. This isn’t new, but we’ll be seeing more of this in 2019.

Digital Detoxes from services will become more frequent

The backlash against tech companies will continue. We should expect to see heavy fines, tech taxes and negative PR consume our feeds. As a result digital detoxes will begin to trend and pausing use of services will continue.

QR Codes finally become a thing in the west

QR Codes came into the world in Japan back in 1994, but it wasn’t until 2012 that they firmly starting taking hold in Asia as a way to open webpage, apps or pay for things. Somehow the west thought that downloading an app to make use of them was too much trouble. Ecommerce moguls Alibaba and Tencent built their payment system around them and now they’re used to access all kinds information including how to access public wifi networks.

Apple has finally built in a QR code reader into their camera of their latest phones, a feature that has been increasingly popular in Android devices over the last year.

AR Booms While VR grows slowly

VR will continue to grow, but it will be even slower than everyone is predicting. A big part of the 2019 growth will be found in VRs awkward brother: 360 video. AR is going to step into the spotlight, we have only started to unlock the creative potential. Not that smartphone hardware is even more capable, esepcially at the mid range, we’re going to see companies attempt to engage consumers in more interesting ways using AR.

We’ll talk more about going to the Moon

SpaceIL an Israli non profit that is privately funded and has plans to use SpaceX to put a pilotless spacecraft on the moon in February of 2019.

The US has earmarked 10.5BN dollars with hopes of getting Orion on the moon by the end of 2019. India has Chandrayaan-2 launching in January with hopes of landing on the moon to study lunar dust. China is looking to get a Chang’e-4 on the dark side of the moon, if they manage it, they will be the first and good news of Pink Floyd royalties.

5G is coming

It isn’t about letting you watch youtube videos faster. 5G is about enabling Industry 4.0, autonomous drive and edge computing. We’ve written about this in the past, but with the ability for real time communication between cars we’re not doing to see autonomous vehicles roll out in a significant way.

Podcasts are the new black.

At any given moment I’m more likely to be wearing headphones then I am shoes. With the rise of smart speakers, we’re listening to more podcasts. In China paying for podcasts is built into the model up front and they’re doing more interesting things with this model than the advertising model found in the west. People are paying for courses in everything from history to business studies and economics. The need to upgrade one skills and keep up with the fast moving economy is driving a learning economy in podcasts.

Mobile Geeks has some podcasts if you’d like to make sure you’re up to date on the latest mobility news and trends.

Visual Search become mainstream

Google image search has been a feature of google lens that has been around for a while. Experts say that visual search will account for 30% of revenue by 2021. 2019 is you or someone will know will have bought something by visual search.

Mobile Geeks also has a 2019 Mobility Prediction article and video if you’re curious about this trend.